Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  Chink paused before each body, examined it for a second, stepped over it to the next, careful not to step into the huge spreading smears of thickening blood and flour, until he worked his way to the back, where he found his mother’s body. Opening the door to the alley in back, he stepped out, and when he knelt down to the ground, as if to pray or vomit, he saw several pairs of white footprints that led down the alley toward the rear of the building.

  Instantly, Chink set off in pursuit of whoever had laid down the tracks. He jogged down the alley, turned left behind the building and climbed over a ramshackle wood fence to another alley, passed through to a packed dirt yard shared by the backsides of a half-dozen tin-roof shanties, where he followed the white footprints across the yard to the rear of an old dark green panel truck sitting wheelless up on cinder blocks. He tiptoed to the rear door of the truck and listened and heard the men inside counting the few miserable dollars they had taken from the bakery. First, he dropped an old piece of iron pipe into the latch, jamming it. Then he walked out to the street to a filling station, boldly stole a five-gallon can of gasoline and brought it back to the panel truck, where he splashed the gasoline onto the packed dirt ground all around the truck, especially at the rear entrance, and poured more gas over the top and along the sides. Last, he lit a match, tossed it at the truck and ran.

  People had watched the entire process from the beginning, and no one said or did a thing to stop Chink, and when the truck exploded in a fireball, the folks in the shanties, many of them mothers with babies on their hips, shouted with obvious pleasure. Later, when the firemen had put out the flames and opened the rear door of the truck, three charred, utterly unrecognizable bodies were discovered huddled inside. No one from the shanties knew who they were, how they got locked inside the truck or who doused the truck with gasoline and set it on fire. “We were inside cooking food,” they said. And no one—that is, no one from the police or fire department—connected the bizarre incineration of the three young men in the panel truck to the massacre of the six people in the bakery two blocks away. In the Gully, however, everyone knew of the connection and spoke of Chink with sympathy and admiration, even those who used to think of him as a lazy, drunken playboy supported by his industrious family.

  Then there was Saverio Gómez Macedo, called Tarzan, because of his great size and overdeveloped physique and the special way he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, which he liked to do at the start of every day. He would untangle himself from his hammock on the porch of his grandmother’s shanty, step to the standpipe by the alley, where the people were already lining up to fill their pans and jars with water for cooking, and he’d give his yell and beat good-naturedly on his enormous chest.

  In exchange for caring for his aged grandmother, who was crippled with arthritis, Tarzan was allowed to sleep on the porch of her cabin. Now and then he got himself hired for daywork, hauling bricks or laying sewer pipe down by the waterfront where the government was building hotels for foreigners, but most of the time he had no money and depended on his grandmother for everything. She, in turn, depended on her children, Tarzan’s aunts and uncles, several of whom now lived in Florida and sometimes sent money.

  The daughter who was Tarzan’s mother had died of cancer many years before, and no one knew who his father was. Thus Tarzan and his grandmother were as close as mother and son. They spent most of their days and evenings sitting out on the shaded, tilted porch of the tiny cabin, where they watched the people pass on the street and chatted and gossiped about the old days and people they used to know. Despite his great size and obvious high spirits, Tarzan was in many ways like a little old man, which, of course, delighted his grandmother and amused everyone in the neighborhood who knew them.

  For that reason most people were amazed by the transformation that Tarzan went through when his grandmother was killed. Her death was an unfortunate accident, and perhaps they expected him simply to accept it as such, as they certainly would have, but he treated it as if it were a cold-blooded murder. Two drug dealers in the neighborhood got into a scuffle over money, not an unusual event, and while chasing each other down the alleys and across the yards of the neighborhood, shooting whenever they caught sight of each other, one of them (it was never determined which one) shot Tarzan’s grandmother, who was sitting on the porch waiting for Tarzan to come home from the store. She died instantly, shot in the throat, just as Tarzan rounded the corner and saw the pair of drug dealers dart between cars on the street, still shooting at one another, heading out of the neighborhood into another. He roared, pounded his chest in rage, frightening those who heard him, and took off after the drug dealers.

  He caught up with them late that night in the back room of a bar out near the airport. Apparently they had settled their differences and were once again doing business with one another, when Tarzan, huge with his anger and his fearlessness, walked into the dingy room, grabbed the two scrawny punks and dragged them out to the street. It was raining, and the street was quiet and almost empty. The bartender and the few customers who were there at the time later described with a kind of horror, a horror oddly mixed with pride, the sound of the skulls cracking as the enormous young man slammed the two men’s heads against one another. Then, when clearly they were dead in his hands, Tarzan tossed the pair like sacks of garbage into the gutter and walked off in the rain. After that, because for a while the drug dealers staved away, but also because of his pain, Tarzan was a hero in the neighborhood.

  In the Gully, true heroes were almost nonexistent. Politicians and soldiers had lived off the people for generations, and athletes, singers, actors—figures whose famous faces were used to sell things people either did not otherwise want or could not afford—were, because of that, no longer trusted or admired or even envied. In the Gully, people had grown cynical. It was their only defense against being used over and over to fatten the already fat. They had learned long ago that it’s the poor who feed the rich, not vice versa. And finally, when it was almost too late and they had almost nothing left to give to the rich, to the politicians, to the businessmen, to the foreigners, finally the people of the Gully had turned away from all projects and enterprises, all plans, all endeavors that depended for their completion on hope. And when you give up hope, and do it on principle—that is, when you do it because you have learned that hope is bad for you—then you give up on heroes as well.

  That is why, when Freckle Face heard people praise Chink and then Tarzan and saw how people admired them for their pain and their rage, when, in short, he realized that he and the other two had become heroes, where before there were none, he determined to capitalize on it as swiftly as possible, before people settled back into their old ways of dismissing heroism as a trick.

  He organized a meeting of the three in the back room of a café close to his rooming house, and when they had shaken hands, each of them slightly in awe of the other two, for they were as unused to genuine heroes as everyone else in the Gully, Freckle Face got quickly down to business. His plan was to build a watchtower in the center of the Gully and for one of them to be posted there at all times, and when he saw a robbery going on, to give the signal, and the others would chase down the robbers and kill them.

  “What for?” Chink asked.

  “For money,” Freckle Face said.

  “Who’d pay us?” Tarzan wanted to know.

  “The robbers’ victims,” Freckle Face explained. “We just return what was stolen and ask for a percentage for our troubles.”

  “It’s wrong to kill for money,” Tarzan said.

  “God kills. You just pull the trigger,” Chink observed. He was definitely interested. Since the death of his parents and sisters, the bakery had been closed, and Chink was down to panhandling on Central Square with a sign around his neck that said, “Help the Avenger of the Bakery Massacre!”

  Tarzan needed money, too. With his grandmother’s death, his uncles and aunts had sold her shanty to a man on the Heights who rented out hundred
s of shanties in the Gully. Consequently, Tarzan had lately been sleeping under two sheets of corrugated iron in back of a warehouse where he hoped to find work as a warehouseman, as soon as his aunt in Florida sent him the money he needed to bribe the foreman to hire him.

  Freckle Face was not much better off. His popularity as a bus driver had cut into the income of the other drivers, and in recent weeks Freckle Face had come into work and found sugar in his gas tank one day, his tires slashed another, or a radiator hose cut, a distributor cap missing, every day another lengthy repair job that kept him in the garage, until he was taking home less than half of what he had been earning before the robberies. He’d stopped buying presents for his girlfriends, and they in turn had stopped turning down other guys. He used to be able to get several women to share him; now, despite being a hero, he could barely get one woman to wait for him to get off work and take her out dancing. A hero without money is just another man.

  In short order, Freckle Face, Chink and Tarzan were making more money than they had ever imagined possible. Quickly they had specialized, Tarzan as lookout, because of his ability to call out the location and route of a thief spotted from the watchtower. He owned a voice so large and clear that every time he gave the alarm, the entire neighborhood became instantly involved in the pursuit and capture of the thief. Often, all Chink and Freckle Face had to do was follow along the pathway in the street that the crowd opened up for them and run directly down the alley people pointed at, enter the basement door indicated by an old woman with her chin, cross into the corner of the basement that stood exposed by a watchman with a flashlight, where Chink would take out the gun Freckle Face had given him and fire two bullets neatly into the man’s head. That was Chink’s specialty, shooting, and he did seem to believe that God did the killing, he only did the shooting.

  Freckle Face’s specialty might be called brokerage. It was he who unclamped the dead thief’s fingers from the stolen money and delivered it back to the shopowner or pedestrian who’d been robbed, and he, therefore, who negotiated the price of the return, he who divided the fee three ways. Also, when it became clear that, if they wished, they could expand their business to other neighborhoods in the Gully, it was Freckle Face who arranged to have the new lookout towers built, he who hired the new lookouts, shooters and collectors and he who knew to put Tarzan in charge of all the lookouts and train them to cup their hands just so and call out exactly, clearly, as loud as a siren, where the thieves were running to. It was Freckle Face who put Chink in charge of procuring weapons for the shooters and training them to use their guns efficiently and responsibly, and of course it was he who trained the collectors, implemented the commission system based on the system used by the bus company and kept track of all the accounts.

  By now, Tarzan owned his own house on the Heights, where he liked to throw wild, lavish parties by the pool, and Chink lived in a condominium on the waterfront, where he kept a forty-foot cabin cruiser anchored year round, and Freckle Face was sleeping with the daughter of the prime minister. They had come a long ways from the Gully and did not believe that they would ever have to return, especially Freckle Face, who had made a whole new set of friends who called him Naldo and barely knew where in the city the Gully was located.

  Sometimes, though, late at night, Freckle Face would rise up from the bed he shared with the daughter of the prime minister, and he’d cross the parquet floor to the louvered doors that led to the terrace, and out on the terrace in the silvery moonlight, he’d lean over the balustrade, light a cigarette and look down and across the sleeping city all the way to the Gully. He’d stand there till dawn, smoking and waiting for the sun to come up and for the people down in the Gully to come out of their shanties and go for water, start up their cook fires, head down to the waterfront looking for work or out to the airport to panhandle tourists or over to Central Square just to hang out in the shade of the mimosa trees. Freckle Face, miles away, up on his terrace, wearing a blue silk robe and smoking French cigarettes, would say over and over to himself, as if it were a magical charm, an incantation: I don’t live there anymore, and no one I know lives there. The people who go on living there must want to live there, or they’d leave that place. Look at Tarzan, look at Chink, look at me!

  Then he’d go inside, shower, shave and dress, and walk downstairs for breakfast, where the first thing he’d do was read the morning newspaper for the names and addresses of thieves shot by his men last night in the Gully. After breakfast, he’d drive out in his brown Mercedes and call on the families of the dead thieves, offering first his condolences and then his card and a special cut-rate coffin and burial service from his Our Lady of the Gully Funeral Parlor chain. Later on, he’d drop by the office and go over the figures. After that, lunch. Then a workout and a massage. Then—who knows? Real estate, maybe. Import-export. Hotels. Life is certainly surprising, he’d think.

  Donald Barthelme

  ME AND MISS MANDIBLE

  13 September

  Miss Mandible wants to make love to me but she hesitates because I am officially a child; I am, according to the records, according to the gradebook on her desk, according to the card index in the principal’s office, eleven years old. There is a misconception here, one that I haven’t quite managed to get cleared up yet. I am in fact thirty-five, I’ve been in the Army, I am six feet one, I have hair in the appropriate places, my voice is a baritone, I know very well what to do with Miss Mandible if she ever makes up her mind.

  In the meantime we are studying common fractions. I could, of course, answer all the questions, or at least most of them (there are things I don’t remember). But I prefer to sit in this too-small seat with the desktop cramping my thighs and examine the life around me. There are thirty-two in the class, which is launched every morning with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. My own allegiance, at the moment, is divided between Miss Mandible and Sue Ann Brownly, who sits across the aisle from me all day long and is, like Miss Mandible, a fool for love. Of the two I prefer, today, Sue Ann; although between eleven and eleven and a half (she refuses to reveal her exact age) she is clearly a woman, with a woman’s disguised aggression and a woman’s peculiar contradictions.

  15 September

  Happily our geography text, which contains maps of all the principal land-masses of the world, is large enough to conceal my clandestine journal-keeping, accomplished in an ordinary black composition book. Every day I must wait until Geography to put down such thoughts as I may have had during the morning about my situation and my fellows. I have tried writing at other times and it does not work. Either the teacher is walking up and down the aisles (during this period, luckily, she sticks close to the map rack in the front of the room) or Bobby Vanderbilt, who sits behind me, is punching me in the kidneys and wanting to know what I am doing. Vanderbilt, I have found out from certain desultory conversations on the playground, is hung up on sports cars, a veteran consumer of Road & Track. This explains the continual roaring sounds which seem to emanate from his desk; he is reproducing a record album called Sounds of Sebring.

  19 September

  Only I, at times (only at times), understand that somehow a mistake has been made, that I am in a place where I don’t belong. It may be that Miss Mandible also knows this, at some level, but for reasons not fully understood by me she is going along with the game. When I was first assigned to this room I wanted to protest, the error seemed obvious, the stupidest principal could have seen it; but I have come to believe it was deliberate, that I have been betrayed again.

  Now it seems to make little difference. This life-role is as interesting as my former life-role, which was that of a claims adjuster for the Great Northern Insurance Company, a position which compelled me to spend my time amid the debris of our civilization: rumpled fenders, roofless sheds, gutted warehouses, smashed arms and legs. After ten years of this one has a tendency to see the world as a vast junkyard, looking at a man and seeing only his (potentially) mangled parts, entering a house only
to trace the path of the inevitable fire. Therefore when I was installed here, although I knew an error had been made, I countenanced it, I was shrewd; I was aware that there might well be some kind of advantage to be gained from what seemed a disaster. The role of The Adjuster teaches one much.

  22 September

  I am being solicited for the volleyball team. I decline, refusing to take unfair profit from my height.

  23 September

  Every morning the roll is called: Bestvina, Bokenfohr, Broan, Brownly, Cone, Coyle, Crecelius, Darin, Durbin, Geiger, Guiswite, Heckler, Jacobs, Kleinschmidt, Lay, Logan, Masei, Mitgang, Pfeilsticker. It is like the litany chanted in the dim miserable dawns of Texas by the cadre sergeant of our basic training company.

  In the Army, too, I was ever so slightly awry. It took me a fantastically long time to realize what the others grasped almost at once: that much of what we were doing was absolutely pointless, to no purpose. I kept wondering why. Then something happened that proposed a new question. One day we were commanded to whitewash, from the ground to the topmost leaves, all of the trees in our training area. The corporal who relayed the order was nervous and apologetic. Later an off-duty captain sauntered by and watched us, white-splashed and totally weary, strung out among the freakish shapes we had created. He walked away swearing. I understood the principle (orders are orders), but I wondered: Who decides?

  29 September

  Sue Ann is a wonder. Yesterday she viciously kicked my ankle for not paying attention when she was attempting to pass me a note during History. It is swollen still. But Miss Mandible was watching me, there was nothing I could do. Oddly enough Sue Ann reminds me of the wife I had in my former role, while Miss Mandible seems to be a child. She watches me constantly, trying to keep sexual significance out of her look; I am afraid the other children have noticed. I have already heard, on that ghostly frequency that is the medium of classroom communication, the words “Teacher’s pet!”